The Advantages of Foreign Policy Restraint

Thomas Wright discusses the roles of “restrainers” and “shapers” in foreign policy debate:

Restraint is an idea that seems to fit the moment. Americans are tired of war and feel more constrained after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. However, over time, the realization will set in that staying out also shapes the world — and probably in a way that is detrimental to America’s interests. It creates a vacuum filled by others. It fuels uncertainty. And it exacerbates crises.

These last three claims can be true of exercising restraint in certain cases, but they can just as easily be true of direct efforts to “shape” the political futures of other countries. Armed foreign intervention, providing military supplies to one side in a conflict, and imposing sanctions on another country create their own kinds of uncertainty and exacerbate the crises they are meant to address, and they do so in ways that directly involve the U.S. and impose longer-term obligations on it. Toppling regimes creates vacuums that are filled by others, and that has been true even when the U.S. has had over a hundred thousand soldiers occupying another country. The reason that restraint often makes more sense than interference is that it is quite unusual to find cases where interfering would benefit the U.S. and the country in question more than it costs both. The impulse to “shape” events in other countries is misguided in principle and frequently destructive in practice. Put bluntly, the “shapers” in both parties have had their turn for the last twelve years, and they aren’t likely to get another one for a while.

It’s hard to credit Wright’s idea that restraint shapes the world in a manner detrimental to U.S. interests. More often than not, those that he calls “shapers” are demanding that the U.S. take action in conflicts and crises in which no American interests are at stake. The “shaper” typically appeals to “values” and intangible things such as “credibility,” and consistently underestimates the costs and likely consequences of the action he recommends. After the last decade, it is extraordinary to find anyone outside the Iraq war dead-ender camp arguing that “the risk of error is outweighed by the risk of inaction.” The U.S. erred on the side of error ten years ago, and it erred very gravely indeed.

Wright frames this as an internal debate of the Democratic Party, and these divisions are clearly present there, but the larger division that he doesn’t discuss nearly as much is the one between the political class, which remains strongly committed to a “shaper” view, and the public, which is mostly sick of new entanglements. As a matter of policy, restraint is wiser, but as a matter of politics it is practically a no-brainer. Democrats have nothing to gain from becoming more activist and meddlesome in foreign policy than the current administration has already been. It needs to be emphasized that this is exactly what Wright says that the “shapers” want:

They do not just want to preserve America’s alliances and commitments; they want to increase them to account for the changing nature of international politics.

Keeping the current number of U.S. commitments overseas seems unsustainable, but the idea of increasing them at this point is laughable. Democratic rank-and-file supporters aren’t interested in doing that, and neither are most Americans regardless of party. The U.S. is already over-committed around the world, and there will not be the political will over the long term to add even more.

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Hide 2 comments

2 Responses to The Advantages of Foreign Policy Restraint

“As a matter of policy, restraint is wiser, but as a matter of politics it is practically a no-brainer. Democrats have nothing to gain from becoming more activist and meddlesome in foreign policy than the current administration has already been.”

Actually, Democrats have the same incentive that Republicans do – intervention is where the money is to fund campaigns, to win elections, and to gain the adulation of a media similarly feeding at the trough of Empire.

We don’t seek to “shape the world” in the interests of the United States, of the American people, or even American values. We seek to shape the world, even at the cost of thousands of American lives and billions of Americans’ earnings, to line the pockets of those financial concerns who are invested abroad and who profit from the very act of waging war.

This was true throughout the Twentieth Century and it remains true today. Just consult Pat Buchanan.

I’m sure Mr. Larison has written extensively about what consitutues “US interests” but it annoys me to know end how they are used to justify doing (or not doing) things without any definition of the interest served.

Surely we can all agree that it is in the interests of all humanity for there to be and end to war, poverty, hunger, pain, and suffering and yet we pursue policies that inflict all those things on humanity every day.

When I look around the US and the world, I see exactly how it has been shaped and whose interests have been served. It’s pretty clear those interests are not mine.